Tuesday night round-up and Open Thread

John Hinderaker makes an excellent point about the appalling silence in the face of Meriam Ibrahim’s imprisonment, and impending lashing and execution, all for the crime of being a Christian woman born to an absentee Muslim father. Ibrahim is married to an American citizen and has two children by him, one of whom, a toddler, is shackled in prison with her, and the other of whom was just born while Meriam was chained to the bed. The same people who were (appropriately) upset by the 300 Nigerian Christian girls whom Boko Haram kidnapped are completely silent about the American children imprisoned in Sudan, and this includes both the State Department and American Christians.

***

With her usual class, Michelle Obama, faced with increasing unrest about her “healthy” school meals (meals that have seen tens of thousands of kids boycott the food), has declared that dissent is “unacceptable.”

Moreover, with a complete lack of irony, the wife of the president in an ostensibly free society insists that the people’s representatives can have no say in the matter: “The first lady said Congress shouldn’t even be setting the standard’s for nutrition. That should be up to experts, she said.”

If you ever wanted to see DemProgs in action, the above is as complete and comprehensive a summary as you will ever find.

***

I’m pleased to see that the Financial Times is refusing to back off of its claim that Piketty didn’t just make mistakes when he wrote his book advocating communism (by another name), he intentionally fudged the data.

One of Piketty’s claims of innocence lies in the fact that he made his data available online. I’m not surprised. Hardcore liars seldom expect anyone to call their bluff when they inundate everyone with unwieldy amounts of material.

I worked on cases like that. The least honest lawyer would deluge counsel and the court with hundreds of case cites and thousands of record citations, secure in the knowledge that the sheer weight of this “evidence” would convince the court of his probity. It was very hard to overcome the court’s reflexive feeling that all those cites and documents must add up to something. Most of these cases weren’t won on the pleadings, but had to go to trial, where the facts and law were directly before the judge, instead of buried in mountains of paper.

***

You know something’s going on when NPR — NPR! — runs a long story about a young couple that couldn’t find any doctors on Obamacare who would handle the wife’s pregnancy, who then dropped their insurance because it was expensive and useless, and had an old-fashioned home delivery without medical attendants. I can only say that they are very lucky that it was a straightforward birth. In the old days, mothers and babies died that way. It would have been tragedy for the family, but I’m betting that Nancy Pelosi would have been able to brush it off.

***

Mass murderers become litmus tests. The feminists conclude he hates women (society’s fault); the entire DemProg party concludes it’s the NRA’s fault (not that Rodgers had any ties to it); and the Hollywood feminists conclude that the solution to gun violence is to let women direct more films. Thelma & Louise part II, anyone?

***

Europe continues its forward march back to the 1930s. Americans are terribly naive when they think that the terms “left” and “right” in Europe mean the same that they do here. The European left is infinitely more malignant even than the DemProgs have gotten, while the right is as statist as the Left, and therefore entirely unlike American conservativism. Worse, both left and right in Europe hate Israel and the Jews, although the European right throws in hated for Islam, while the European left continues to invite sharia to come on in.

Walter Williams sums up some of the worst examples of the lunacy that takes place at the annual White Privilege Conference put on for American educators. These people sound like fringe nutcases, but they go back and infect America’s education system from root to branch.

***

Your tax dollars at work: Columbia University spends millions on inciting climate hysteria, including fake voice mails that purport to be the words of people in the future dying from the effects of man-made climate change. No surprise. It’s a religion. As the actual, data-driven science disproves it with increasing frequency, the faithful must scream out more loudly to silence dissent. Meriam Ibrahim would understand.

The thing about the Left is that they are allied with Islamic Jihad. As for why I think that, people can generally connect the dots once they learn to think strategically about those stories you linked. Most people don’t, they just look at them in isolation, they don’t connect the dots between the State Dep, Sudan, this woman, that law, this ruling, etc. It’s all… isolated in their minds, shut off in sealed compartments. They don’t have the key to their own mind house, these Leftist cannonfodder.

JKB, you check out John Scalzi’s election day “trigger” article on politics? The reason why he got the name McRapey from Vox?

Libby

Yes, it is amazing that so much energy has been spent “raising awareness” about the kidnapped Nigerian girls and nothing about Meriam Ibrahim’s and Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi’s plight? Why do the Obamas care more about those girls when, while distressing, it is not our problem to fix?

The Obamas and the Left want no part of inconvenient narratives, such as the intolerance & brutality of Islam, or that Mexico treats US citizens within their borders harshly while they insist Mexicans within our borders be treated better than legal immigrants & US citizens. Meanwhile, the Nigerian girls fit so nicely into their silly War on Women narrative.

And how is it that Obama and Kerry can continue to negotiate with Iran when they are executing gays and people like Meriam Ibrahim, and loudly proclaiming “Death to America?” The world is upside-down.

Writing this blog is a labor of love. However, if you'd like to donate money for my efforts, please feel free to do so: